Twice now, my partner and I have visited Derek Jarman’s Dungeness home, Prospect Cottage. The visits made powerful impressions on us both. The cottage, bought thanks to a successful crowdfunding campaign, has only been open to the public since 2023.
Derek Jarman (1942-1994) was a modern Renaissance man. He is perhaps most famous as a director of experimental, art-house films and as a Turner Prize-nominated artist, but he was also a theatrical designer, a writer and an innovative gardener. He campaigned fearlessly for gay rights at a period when the UK Government was legislating to limit them and was boldly ‘out’ himself. Tragically, he contracted AIDS when doing so was a death sentence.
Driving through Kent in the spring of 1986 in search of a film location, Jarman stopped off for fish and chips in Dungeness–itself a weird and wonderful place, oddly reflecting Jarman’s outsider status. Dungeness is sometimes described as the UK’s only desert, a shingle headland backed by the Romney Marsh. It has the eerie feel of a place cut off, remote, lost in time. The weather can be extreme, and yet it is a wildlife haven supporting over 600 kinds of plants, as well as many rare invertebrates. A handful of old fishermen’s cottages is sprinkled across the shingle, with a vast nuclear power station looming incongruously over them. The atmosphere is, as many have noted, unique and otherworldly.
Here Jarman spotted and fell inimprobability of it made the purchase inescapable.” For the rest of his life, Jarman split his time between the cottage and his London flat. It was in December 1986 that he received the devastating diagnosis of AIDS, and the remote cottage became a refuge for him. Artistic residencies are now available at the cottage; but be warned–we were told that the bleak beachscape and eerie atmosphere is too much for some people. However it seems that Dungeness suited Jarman (literally) down to the ground, for here he established his famous garden.